Everything Is Wrong with Me

Jason Mulgrew's memoir grew out of a popular blog whose title promised a thirty-year-old who was bipolar and always hungry. Its pages mix self-examination with comedy and a long run of spectacularly poor judgment.

The book is a dysfunctional family memoir. In it, a father's arrest for attempted murder on Christmas Eve is presented as just one more memory from a childhood of such stories.

The setting is South Philadelphia, a working-class neighborhood that seems to have been overlooked by time. Mulgrew recalls the Mummers Parade, stealing cable through a device called the chip, and the 1980s and 1990s, with their Sega Genesis consoles, shoplifted condoms, cap guns, and a first encounter with pornography on a fuzzy cable channel.

The humorous essays cover a Scotch Bonnet pepper challenge, a fireworks-selling business run during childhood, and a search for prostitutes in his father's truck, which turns out to have an unexpectedly tender undertone.